Vacation Requests/Entry

Use this forum to discuss desired new features for TimeTrex
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aipinc
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Aug 09, 2010 1:14 pm

Vacation Requests/Entry

Post by aipinc »

This is a multi-part request, so please bear with me.

One of our biggest frustrations with using Timetrex is managing the entry of new requests and the process for approving said requests. In its current form, it isn't much more helpful than an employee emailing an HR person with the same information.

In its current form (for webbased customers), An employee can create a new request for time off (or for a needed edit, like missed punch, etc), that is then passed to a superior for approval. But the form doesn't really contain all of the information needed for decision makers to act on the request. (No Accrual Balances displayed, inability to indicate multiple days, inability to indicate specific request type, etc)

1.) At the very least, it would be great if when a request came in to a supervisor, it could also pull the appropriate accrual balance (e.g. If the employee is requesting a vacation day(s), then when the supervisor views the request they would also see the employees available vacation balance). This would require additional input from the employee creating the request (as they would need to be able to more specifically detail the kind of request they are making. Currently the choices are somewhat general.

2.) Taking this one step further, it would be ideal if the system could calculate future balances for decision making purposes. For instance, it is January and an employee is requesting 2 weeks off in April. The employee currently has 1 week of vacation time accrued. The system would show the supervisor how much time the employee 'would' have accrued by the date of the request, when deciding whether or not to approve it. This seems pretty straightforward.

3.) Finally, given that you had a much improved request system that was actually tied in to information from the employee making the request, if approved requests could be automatically entered into the employees timesheet, I think my hr people would be dancing in the streets. It would cut down on the need to know which requests need to be manually entered during which pay periods, making the tracking and entering of requests much less laborious than it is now. Which saves time, and time is money. This would also require enhancements to the front end of the request system, as currently there is no way to indicate a request for multiple days off. This would also help rationalize the accrual balances so committed future time is taken out of the balance, and employees can know what vacation time they have available in the interim.

Sorry for writing a novel of a feature request, but I get a lot of feedback from our users, and while they are generally happy with the system this drives them crazy. I have seen similar features with other time management packages, but would prefer to stick with TimeTrex if at all possible (as I generally like the system, and the supports in place).

Thank you.
shaunw
Posts: 7839
Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 2:22 pm

Re: Vacation Requests/Entry

Post by shaunw »

Thank you for your feature requests, these features have been on our TODO list for quite a while, however unfortunately they are not all easy problems to solve, at least when trying to keep things as simple as possible.

We are always interested in hearing feedback from companies using TimeTrex, so I will outline some of the issues and considerations below:
1.) At the very least, it would be great if when a request came in to a supervisor, it could also pull the appropriate accrual balance (e.g. If the employee is requesting a vacation day(s), then when the supervisor views the request they would also see the employees available vacation balance). This would require additional input from the employee creating the request (as they would need to be able to more specifically detail the kind of request they are making. Currently the choices are somewhat general.
This sounds simple in theory, but the issue that comes into play is that the employee must be able to select which absence policy they are requesting time off against, how many hours they want off for each day, and how many days that want off in total. Currently TimeTrex does not assign absence policies to specific employees (via Policy Groups), so without that the employee would be able to choose one of any absence policy that exists, which also means ones that are maybe only useful to other employees, or ones that HR does not want employees to see at all. In addition to that, often there are several absence policies that are virtually the same, but only used in specific cases that employees may not be fully aware of.

A common example for just the vacation absence policies; customers can often have 2, 3 or even 5 or more absence policies just for vacation alone. One that deducts from an accrual, one that doesn't, multiple ones that deduct from multiple corresponding accrual policies (common when departments may have differing accrual policies), one that docks salaried employee time, one that pays out above salaried employees time, etc...

Without additional training for all employees it can be difficult for them to select the proper policy, in which case it just needs to be corrected by the supervisor anyways. Things are even further complicated when dealing with a one week vacation request when the employee may only have time available for 2 or 3 days, where the employee may have to make multiple requests for each of the "proper" absence policies, or worse yet when the employee submits the wrong request and the supervisor has to try to split it up afterwards.

In the simplest case possible, this system would work great, however it has huge holes as soon as it gets marginally more complex, while at the same you are moving the training from a small group of supervisors/HR personnel to the largest possible group, all employees. It also doesn't solve the real problem, of employees submitting the wrong information and the time consuming process of trying to decipher or correct what they submit, in fact some would argue that it increases the chance of the problem occurring.

The existing request system that is made up of just a free-form message is really about as efficient as you can get from an employee submitting stand-point, assuming they are properly trained and submit all the necessary information. However a more complex request system is going to be even more susceptible to incorrect or poor employee training for the simple fact that you are putting more responsibility on the employees themselves to know the companies policies so they can make the proper selections on the request form.

Unfortunately in order to resolve all these holes, additional complexity needs to be added to other parts of TimeTrex, which may or may not be worth it.
2.) Taking this one step further, it would be ideal if the system could calculate future balances for decision making purposes. For instance, it is January and an employee is requesting 2 weeks off in April. The employee currently has 1 week of vacation time accrued. The system would show the supervisor how much time the employee 'would' have accrued by the date of the request, when deciding whether or not to approve it. This seems pretty straightforward.
This feature will likely be available in the near future, however in the mean time setting up accrual policies to apply to the employees record on an annual basis rather than more frequently essentially serves the same purpose.
3.) Finally, given that you had a much improved request system that was actually tied in to information from the employee making the request, if approved requests could be automatically entered into the employees timesheet, I think my hr people would be dancing in the streets. It would cut down on the need to know which requests need to be manually entered during which pay periods, making the tracking and entering of requests much less laborious than it is now. Which saves time, and time is money. This would also require enhancements to the front end of the request system, as currently there is no way to indicate a request for multiple days off. This would also help rationalize the accrual balances so committed future time is taken out of the balance, and employees can know what vacation time they have available in the interim.
If the first feature is implemented, this one would likely be implemented at the same time. Again though it is far from the silver bullet, as it would never be able to take into account other issues or complex scenarios with employees timesheets that only humans can deal with, such things like duplicate requests that are different from one another, or cases where supervisors made adjustments outside the request system that conflict with the request itself.
as currently there is no way to indicate a request for multiple days off.
This is a common misconception, the request system has a date associated with it, but that date does not actually mean anything in reality, its simply a "helper" to speed things up and sort requests by newest to oldest. Therefore nothing is stopping employees from creating a vacation request with the date "15-Dec-10" and in the message requesting 15 days off from 15-Dec-10 to 30-Dec-10. Employees do not need to submit 15 requests, one for each day of course.
aipinc
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Aug 09, 2010 1:14 pm

Re: Vacation Requests/Entry

Post by aipinc »

Thanks for the quick reply Shaun.

In relation to the first point, is there a particular reason why

"Currently TimeTrex does not assign absence policies to specific employees (via Policy Groups), so without that the employee would be able to choose one of any absence policy that exists"? Or that employees would have to fill out more specific information in their initial request?

I know that with our company, currently employees still have to fill out some kind of request form (our supervisors have been relunctant to adopt Timetrex's electronic messaging system for the reasons previously outlined), and on that form the employee has to indicate the days off they are requesting, the amount of hours being used, and if it's a sick/personal/vacation day, etc. Basically, all of the information that a supervisor would need to make a decision. So I don't imagine it would be any more difficult for employees to fill that kind of form out electronically.

And in regards to the multiple accrual accounts, we already have a little of that (though our system isn't really that complex), but sick and personal both drawn from the same accrual (but are tagged differently for supervisory purposes). So why couldn't you have that also set up in policy setting on the back end? Admins would assign people to groups, which have all of their different accrual policies assigned to appropriate buckets so if you had 5 different types of vacation accounts for users (some visible to the employee, some not), and the employee selects Vacation(for the request), the supervisor would be able to see all applicable balances (as set up by the administrators)? They still might have to make some kind of judgment call, but at least they should have all of the information they would require to make a decision.

Even if it was simplified to only containing the accrual accounts applicable to that employee (based on policy group), that would be a big step forward. Right now on the entry side, when a supervisor is entering in an absence, they have to be able to pick out the applicable accrual account from a list of ALL of the possible accrual accounts for the whole company. So even if employee X was in a policy group with 5 or 6 different accruals, it would still be easier to quickly pick out the correct one if you limit the correct set of choices.

To the last point, about multi-day requests, I know that the system is currently just for messaging, so I could simply write "I need to take off days x-y". So there is just one request, but it could still require multiple entries onto the timesheet (depending on how the requested time fell in the week). I see that you can enter an absence and then "repeat absence for X days after requested day", but what if there is a weekend in the middle, or some days are accounting for fewer than 8 hours, or if a already scheduled Holiday falls in the middle (like Christmas or Thanksgiving)?

I'm glad to hear that some of these changing should be coming down the pipes, and as I said before, we really like most of the product. Just trying to provide some productive feedback.
shaunw
Posts: 7839
Joined: Tue Sep 19, 2006 2:22 pm

Re: Vacation Requests/Entry

Post by shaunw »

"Currently TimeTrex does not assign absence policies to specific employees (via Policy Groups), so without that the employee would be able to choose one of any absence policy that exists"? Or that employees would have to fill out more specific information in their initial request?

I know that with our company, currently employees still have to fill out some kind of request form (our supervisors have been relunctant to adopt Timetrex's electronic messaging system for the reasons previously outlined), and on that form the employee has to indicate the days off they are requesting, the amount of hours being used, and if it's a sick/personal/vacation day, etc. Basically, all of the information that a supervisor would need to make a decision. So I don't imagine it would be any more difficult for employees to fill that kind of form out electronically.
For every additional option we add to policy groups, it has the potential to increase the number of policy groups required exponentially. If a customer had two policy groups currently, one for hourly non-exempt and one for salaried exempt employees, if we added absence policies into the mix, and they had 4 absence policies for a sub-set of each of the hourly employees, and 4 for a sub-set of each of the salaried employees, they would now need to have a total of 8 policy groups. We have some customers where this change would essentially require them to have 100 or more policy groups.

Obviously they could assign every absence policy to each of the original two policy groups to keep the same behavior they have now, but they have just disclosed each of the absence policies to employees even if they didn't want to. Like most things, its a double edged sword.
To the last point, about multi-day requests, I know that the system is currently just for messaging, so I could simply write "I need to take off days x-y". So there is just one request, but it could still require multiple entries onto the timesheet (depending on how the requested time fell in the week). I see that you can enter an absence and then "repeat absence for X days after requested day", but what if there is a weekend in the middle, or some days are accounting for fewer than 8 hours, or if a already scheduled Holiday falls in the middle (like Christmas or Thanksgiving)?
Almost anyway you cut it there would be multiple entries required, either by the employee or the supervisor. Currently supervisors can use the Mass Schedule page to quickly schedule one or more employees for multiple days while skipping weekends or other days if they wish. When you start to consider holidays, its unlikely that the employees will properly consider Christmas day when they are scheduling a two week vacation around it. To properly handle this at best there would be two requests required, perhaps even three (one for the time before Christmas, and one for time after Christmas, perhaps even one for Christmas itself depending on how your policies are setup). This is a prime example of where the "employee does most of the work" request system starts to fall apart.

All of the issues described is why this feature hasn't been implemented yet, there are a lot of non-trivial questions that need to be answered, and no one answer will work for all of our customers, and some answers have the potential to severely hurt other customers.
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